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Why load a document only to have it mangled by converting it to the internal format of some online text editor?

When loading a document, any document, that you want to edit and then save back, there should be no conversion whatsoever. The question of how good support for ODF is, should not be 'how badly does it mangle my documents?'. It should be a given that the document is *not* mangled. The question on how good the support for ODF, or any file format, is, should be: 'what types of edits can this program make on this file format.'

For decades, we're accepting that documents editors save back a file that, on the binary level, is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike the original file. How weird this leniency towards document editors is, becomes apparent when looking at at how computer programmers work with documents. Computer programmers always use plain text files for everything. When the text editors they use saves their documents with tabs instead of spaces, or utf16 instead of utf8, they get quite irate and will abandon that text editor forever. Why do normal users not get angry at document editors that mangle their documents?

So instead of choosing these horrible black box online text editors, I advise you to use something like WebODF. This ODF editor, which is purely client-side javascript, can run on your private site and saves your ODF back as it found it with changes only in the places where you edited the document.

Answer: there is no schema. Validating documents seems to have gone out of fashion. Writing a parser for HTML5 is extremely difficult. Basically the broken parsing behavior of old browsers is now standardized in a crazy arcane description of how to parse HTML5 documents.

A law that forbids selling hardware and software together would increase innovation. Consumers would only be able to buy hardware and software separately. That way, hardware vendors are encouraged to document the hardware and software vendors will compete on quality. Installation procedures would become very easy very quickly due to market pressure.

The WebODF developers take security very seriously. WebODF runs in a browser and web browsers are the most battle hardened sandboxes available.

WebODF has no more access to your hard drive than any unprivileged website. If you press the icon to open a file, WebODF asks the browser to let the user pick one file. That file, and only that file that the user chose, is then passed to WebODF so it can open it. This is no different from an HTML form for uploading files. The difference is that WebODF does not need to even pass the file to a server. It is a client-side library that can parse a file purely in the browser without any network access.

If you use WebODF with a CMS, you can let the CMS decide which files WebODF has access to. When WebODF loads a document, it checks for any JavaScript present and prevents it from being executed.

WebODF is set up such that you only need a few files to run it and all those files can be hosted on your own server or placed in your own application. There is no need for any reliance on any 3rd party.

ownCloud is one of the projects that uses WebODF. It is software to install a personal cloud on your own hardware. There are also native Windows applications using WebODF. There's also a Firefox OS app to view ODF documents on your phone.

Zarafa and Kolab already use WebODF for displaying ODF attachments, but not yet for editing. There's also an android app that handles displaying ODF documents by registering to handle the ODF mimetypes.

I hope this will get the same following as the fairphone did. That project was a good success and has built a user base to grow from. It's especially jarring to great projects like vivaldi fail when government regularly throw away hundreds of millions on failed ict projects.

An anonymous reader writes "KDE is looking for donations to fund Randa Meetings 2014. The biggest hackaton sprint of KDE with more than 50 people working on more than 7 different projects."Link to Original Source

When importing an ODT into Google Docs, it is converted to a format internal to Google Docs. The blog post explains that in WebODF / ownCloud Documents, conversely, no conversion occurs.

For example, WebODF does not support displaying columns yet, but if you have loaded a document with columns, after saving, the columns will still be there.

Since the document is part of the DOM, you can edit it programmatically with JavaScript. So adding functionality for scientific citations is as easy as any website programming. You can do it the clean way and use operations, or you can change the DOM directly. (The latter is not advised in collaborative mode.) So yes, integrating with Zotero, should not be hard.

Adding WebODF into a workflow for collaboratively writing research proposals could be useful. One author adds 'fancy' stuff in e.g. LibreOffice and the other contributors make corrections and additions in a web version of the document.

The server side can be really simple. In a real-time collaboration scenario, there needs to be conflict resolution. The code for that is implemented in JavaScript as well and, in the case of ownCloud Documents, runs in the clients.

Each change to the document is sent as a numbered operation to the server. If a change with the same number has already arrived, the latest changes are sent back to the client. The client then modifies/rebases the original change on top of the new changes and send the change again.

The server stores each individual numbered change for the document as well as snapshots of the document for certain revisions. With some work, one could even store the change (audit trail) inside the document.

AbiCollab certainly precedes by many years. WebODF is newer and has two advantages of AbiCollab.net.

First, WebODF runs just in a browser with no need to install it locally. It runs completely on a webpage. That's why it can by integrated into any web-based workflow. E.g. a user could generate a document by filling in a questionnaire and edit a document afterwards with WebODF.

Second, there is no document conversion. A document that is loaded into LibreOffice, AbiWord, OpenOffice, or Microsoft Office, edited and saved again, will be significantly different from the original document. Features may be lost or saved differently. Since WebODF just loads the ODF XML into the DOM and saves back the DOM, the document is unchanged, except for the places that have been edited. This is even true when the documents contains features, e.g. xforms, that are not supported yet.

oever (233119) writes "ownCloud is announcing an exciting new feature for ownCloud 6. It seems that it might grow into a Google Docs alternative. Today Frank Karlitschek blogged about ownCloud Documents, a new feature that lets multiple users work on one text document at the same time. The feature uses WebODF, a javascripts libary for editing ODF documents."Link to Original Source